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There's a general consensus that entropy is deeply spooky. It pops up in physics in black holes and the heat death of the universe. The physicist Erwin Schrodinger suggested that life itself consumes negative entropy, and others have proposed other definitions of life that are entropic. Some definitions of intelligence also centre on entropy.

What to make of all that however, has anything but consensus.

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To have entropy, you need to have a notion of information. To have information, you have to decide which differences matter, I.e. which states you classify as the same.

This isn't a problem for physics, or for computer science. But it is a problem for would-be philosophers (including a few physicists and computer scientists!) who thought information was a shortcut to avoid answering big questions about what matters, what we care about.

I liked the awe you shared -- it made me want to learn more about entropy.

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